But what about Bob? [Shepard and Sarah; possibly open to threadjacking later idk]

[hows_the_knee]

who: Shepard & Sarah
what: Exploring the station. And possible definite grilling about each others' respective AIs.
where: Lost in a holographic nightmare.
when: Right about the time that blacktwo and nobletwo fuck up the holograms try and turn the lights back on.
warning(s): Angry, angry Sarah.

Comments

[cmdr_renegade]

The siren was something new, that was for goddamn certain. Shepard winced slightly as it went off.

The skinning had vanished when the power came back on, had given everyone the mild reprieve of an arbitrary daytime period, and Shepard had resumed her search at the first possible opportunity. Now, as the siren went off and the lights went out, she found herself trapped, again, in the belly of the holographic beast. The room phased in around her and Shepard let out a ragged, irritated sigh.

"Fuck!"

That had come from the far wall.

While strange voices murmuring through walls wasn't exactly new, they tended to be more verbose and less clear or concise. Shepard waited, but there wasn't a follow up, yet another unusual note. After a pause, Shepard moved to the newly skinned wall and knocked on the surface.

[hows_the_knee]

And now there was knocking, in addition to the voices.

Wait.

Sarah was silent, not daring to make a sound. The knocking came again, not threatening or insistent, just...there. More real than any of the music or voices had been.

She picked up her gun and crept stealthily over to the wall, ready to shoot if the thing on the other side proved able and of a mind to barge through.

"Who's there?"

[cmdr_renegade]

Shepard quirked a brow.

"Boo," she answered arbitrarily and stopped knocking on the wall. The voice didn't sound particularly familiar, but it wasn't unknown. Shepard was silent as she tried to place it.

[hows_the_knee]

Sarah paused.

Of all the possible responses she'd been anticipating, that wasn't one of them.

But as crazy as her life often was, Sarah also had a very normal ten year old son. And the traditional response was out of her mouth before she had a chance to think twice about it.

"Boo who?"

[terminatenomore]

The Terminator responded in less than five minutes. It also brought two shotguns, one holographic, the other very real. It recognized that Sarah explicitly said she wasn't in any danger, but it also wised up to that fact that when the two of them were in close proximity, trouble liked to follow.

It rounded a corner to meet them, it was plucking out tiny twigs and leaves that matted in it's messy crew cut. When it got the call, it was watching the holographic fantasy bird creatures from something in-game called a Life Tree. First time the Terminator ever got to find a tree with branches capable of holding it's immense weight. Damn right it jumped on that opportunity.

"Sarah-" it greeted before drifting off when it saw she was being accompanied by,

"Commander Shepard." The Terminator might have looked shocked, but only might. The Terminator concluded this was no doubt about the incident when it first met the commander. It looked back at Sarah, motioning to Shepard-

"She started it."

[cmdr_renegade]

"I didn't start shit," Shepard snapped and reached for her gun, almost reflexively. She caught herself before she drew it, fortunately, and merely clenched her fingers around the grip. Bob the combat drone only got ornery around birds and cameras, in her experience, but now that Shepard was arguing with its master, there was no telling what it'd haul off and do.

This was especially the case, if Legion had gone and infected it with pesky free will.

It also had two too many shotguns for her express comfort, archaic or not.

"You were the one crouched in the bushes like a two-ton, combat drone, stalker," Shepard added and glanced at Sarah. "Bob the birdwatcher, here, is your kill bot?"

[hows_the_knee]

"That's right," Sarah confirmed, crossing her arms and looking between Shepard and the Terminator. "I don't know about any birdwatching, but yeah." She glanced at Shepard's hand gripping her gun. "So you might wanna relax before you make it too nervous."

She looked back at the Terminator. "I take it you two know each other. Feel like sharing with the class?"

[terminatenomore]

"To clarify," the Terminator kept it's eyes on Shepard while it spoke, hands on the trigger of the very real shotgun. Had Shepard's hand moved even one inch more earlier, the cyborg would've gone what most humans refer to as- 'ape shit.'

"Both our encounters were in which the Commander approached us, not the reverse," it paused to brush off a few stray twigs clinging to it's clothes, "the first time we prevented her from documenting our presence, the second we had to protect ourselves when the Commander was heavily intoxicated and threatening a rare species of swallow."

It not so subtly took a side step, moving in between Sarah and Shepard. Not enough to obstruct both women from each other, just enough to make itself known as something that took it's job as the dumb muscle with a hair trigger very seriously.